Updating St. Anselm

John J. Reilly

Cultures have their insistences. Navajos, I am told, tend to leave
unfinished some little detail of any work they do, just for good luck.
Thus, a geometrical design will have a corner undone, or a familiar story
will be told on any given occasion with a minor incident omitted. The Bolshevik
regime in Russia was vehemently antireligious, yet its leaders found it
perfectly natural to embalm and perpetually display the body of Lenin for
all the world like the incorrupt body of a Russian saint.

America too has its insistences, features of its culture that are often
invisible to the natives but the most striking characteristics of the country
in the eyes of foreigners. America, we know from earliest report, has always
managed to be both extremely religious and implacably antimetaphysical.
Thus, America is the world capital both of textual literalism in religion
and of science ambitious to prophesy. Without careful watching, Americans
will tend to reduce metaphysical questions to engineering problems, all
the while believing that they are resolving real metaphysical difficulties.

A particularly vivid example of this tendency is provided by Frank
J. Tipler's new book, The Physics of Immortality. In this book Dr.
Tipler, Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University, purports
to demonstrate scientifically the existence of God, the resurrection of
the dead, and the moral coherence of the universe (indeed, of all universes,
since the author is an adherent of the "Many Worlds" interpretation
of quantum mechanics). The Physics of Immortality sets out an amplified
and more extreme version of the speculations about the fate of the universe
that appeared in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986), a
highly influential work that Tipler coauthored with the British astrophysicist,
John D. Barrow. The gist of the earlier book, at least as I understood
it, is that we are living in a very improbable universe. If any of the
physical and mathematical constants on which physical reality depends were
only slightly different, there would not only be no human race, there would
be nothing worth mentioning. The Anthropic Principle is that, despite the
modern cliche that we live in a hostile world unconcerned with human happiness,
in reality the structure and history of the universe are friendly to man.
Indeed, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle also claimed to prove
that man is the only intelligent species in the universe, and will be the
only progenitor of the greater intelligences yet to be. In The Physics
of Immortality, the author explains how the universe can be this way
and what its future must be.

Tipler is primarily an expert in global relativity theory, a discipline
whose founding he credits to Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking. Global
relativity theory is largely concerned with the shape of the universe in
hyperspace, which means both in space and time. When you know what form
the universe will assume, you know a lot about its destiny. A closed universe
is one with sufficient mass that gravity causes it to eventually cease
expanding from the original Big Bang and ultimately fall back in on itself.
While there are some highly unlikely situations in which a reexpansion
could then occasion a new cosmic cycle, the most likely fate for a closed
universe is a singularity, a black hole. There is no before or after this
single stroke of expansion and contraction, since time, too, expands and
contracts in the process. A universe that is open or flat, on the other
hand, will either continue to expand indefinitely, or expand ever more
slowly toward a limit. In either case, such a universe will suffer the
"heat death," that is, eventually all the energy in it will be
used up. Tipler argues that the only way life could survive would be in
a closed universe. Now life, in the scheme of this book, is simply a kind
of pattern. Human minds are computer programs, and even human bodies could
be perfectly expressed ("emulated") in a computer program. It
is in this form, as patterned information, that life will survive into
the harsh conditions of the far future, which no conceivable flesh and
blood could bear.

If a final collapse were structured correctly, intelligent entities
would have more and more energy available to them the closer the collapse
comes to the Omega Point. (Remember that this collapse does not mean just
that all the stuff in space is closing in on a central point, it means
that all of space itself is closing in on a central point.) If time is
interpreted to mean subjective time, the time in which you think, these
entities could in fact concentrate a literal infinity of experience into
the final instants of the universe. In the approach to the Omega Point,
all the information there is, the entire history of the universe down to
its least detail, will be available in principle. Since an infinity of
energy will also be available, everything that could be done in principle
could also be done in fact. Even if the retrieval of this information entails
insurmountable technical problems, still nothing will be lost: it will
be possible to create a computer emulation of the universe, indeed of every
possible universe that could have occurred given the known number of atomic
particles. The mathematical explanation that the author gives for the problem
of emulating all possible universes is a tribute to the power of multiple
exponents to express really, really big numbers.

These emulations will, of course, include us, so we will be resurrected.
The computers of this ultimate age will not be vulgar hardware, but ethereal
entities composed of bent space and structured energy. They will advance
in wisdom and power as more energy becomes available to them. (The author
uses price theory to show that they will also advance in goodness, since
altruism on their part will become ever cheaper to them. They will love
us and care for us.) Long before the end of the universe's history, all
the matter in it will have been restructured to the specifications of intelligent
entities. The stars themselves will only be construction material. In the
lattermost days, all creation will become a single, thinking artifact.
The limit of this process is the Omega Point, the singularity beyond the
end of the universe, which relativity theory represents simply as a boundary,
as something outside time.

Still, It will be Personal, since It will incorporate the ability to
generate personalities. It will be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent.
Being omnipresent might not seem to be much of an accomplishment when the
cosmos has just become a dimensionless point. Omnipresence is more complicated
than that, however. Although the physics of everyday life is subject to
the second law of thermodynamics, so that ordinarily physical events are
not reversible, this is not true of global relativity. In the latter context,
the future determines the past as much as the other way around. Thus, the
Omega Point in the ultimate future determined the initial cosmic conditions
that made it possible, which means it is also the creator. The Omega Point,
by any reasonable definition, is You Know Who.

Elements of this scenario may seem counterintuitive to the uninstructed
reader. They make a bit more sense if you understand that the author explicitly
declares his intention to be nothing less than to make theology a branch
of physics. He warns us that this is the only way that religion could possibly
survive, since science has made the supernatural as traditionally conceived
unbelievable to the educated person. Or at any rate, he says it is unbelievable
to scientists.

In his theological ambitions, Tipler can hardly be accused of autodidacticism.
He has consulted extensively with modern theologians to see whether they
could give a credible account of their faith in traditional terms. He has,
predictably, found them as a class to be blithering hypocrites, more interested
in politics than in God. The chief exception among living theologians is
Wolfhart Pannenberg, whose radically eschatological theology he finds congenial.
His favorite dead theologian is Thomas Aquinas. I, for one, find this perfectly
reasonable. St. Thomas' angels do in fact bear a suspicious resemblance
to mathematical entities that could easily be expressed in algorithms.
The Thomistic theory of perception does lend itself to being expressed
as digital data encryption. Tipler's hope for immortality rests in large
part in the supposed characteristics of a kind of non-thermodynamic time
very much like Thomas' "aevum." But I digress.

Given the author's breathtaking notions of what physics encompasses,
his ambitions are almost logical. For instance, he notes that Leibnitz's
principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles (which means that if you can't
tell two things apart, then they are really the same thing) has held up
pretty well in practice. Therefore, he pronounces it a principle of physics.
The problem with declaring everything that is true to be part of physics
is that it makes it difficult for him to make certain distinctions, such
as that between logical and physical impossibility. For instance, he notes
that God can only be acquitted of being the author of evil if it would
have been logically impossible for God to have created a world in which
evil was impossible. He then solves the problem of theodicy by pointing
out that his "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics
permits a very large number of almost perfect worlds, all converging on
the Omega Point. There are many worlds because, according to Tipler, everything
that quantum physics says might happen, does happen, but in different worlds
(or, as he prefers, along different histories). This is why the Omega Point
has to occur, since even if it is improbable, there must still be histories
in which it actually does happen. If this is the way the universe is structured,
then it would be a violation of the laws of physics for God to have removed
all the bad possibilities from these history lines. The author, however,
seems to think that such an intervention would have been a violation of
logic.

The last three chapters of the book (there is also an extensive Appendix
for Scientists) attempts to reconcile the Omega Point Theory with the world's
religions. In these chapters, I found the author addressing many points
that I had made in the margins of the earlier chapters. (He had hosted
a colloquium on this theory, and it seems that many of the participants
must have been awake.) For instance, though he finds the historical evidence
for Christianity unpersuasive, he does note that the body of the post-Easter
Jesus as depicted in the Gospels does have many of the qualities that a
computer-emulated body would have in an emulated environment. That is,
it was solid and organic, able to change its appearance, and able to appear
instantly in any part of the emulation at will. He also notes that if it
were necessary to the formation of the Omega Point for Jesus to rise from
the dead, then quantum mechanics would make this extraordinarily unlikely
event not just possible, but inevitable.

There are moments where the author seems to grow uncomfortable with
the implications of his insistence that everything in the universe, without
exception, can be transformed into a computer program. Programs can exist
within programs. "Virtual" computers, consisting purely of information,
can exist and function within hardware computers. This sort of relationship
strongly suggests the traditional metaphysical notion of "levels of
being." For a world being emulated on a computer, the system below
it (on a lower level of "implementation") would be quite literally
supernatural. Tipler insists that there is no evidence for a level of implementation
below the level of the world we see. Well, there's a comfort. The fact
is, however, that though he imagines himself to be giving Platonic metaphysics
a drubbing with his ontological monism, what he has in fact done is create
a particularly unnerving form of Neoplatonism. His physics is essentially
a hierarchy of mind.

The Physics of Immortality could perhaps only have occurred
in the same culture, and in the same era, that would keep a book like James
Redfield's The Celestine Prophecy on the best-seller list for a
year. That book presents both interpersonal relationships and the structure
of history as outcomes of the evolving economy of "qi" force.
This is the invisible universal vital power that all living creatures are
supposed to generate, and the struggle for which creates so much trouble
in the world. How to deal with other people's need for vital energy and
how to get your own are the basic questions of ethics. Both books confuse
a kind of stuff with metaphysical principles, and both tend to render the
real stuff in the world a little more ghostly, because they ask it to do double duty as spirit.
The authors are incredulous of radical evil. Tipler informs us that science
has shown that there neither are nor will be any evil spirits, while even
the villains in The Celestine Prophecy are just suffering from psychic
malnourishment. The books appeal to a fierce desire for religion coupled
with an almost invincible incomprehension of its traditional forms. In
particular, neither has much use for a God who can be prayed to, except
as a psychological exercise. Perhaps both will find comparable amounts
of appeal to readers with different kinds of education. However, I rather
think that, in a contest, the sort of spirituality found in The Celestine
Prophecy would win out. Both books, after all, are about equally confused,
and The Celestine Prophecy has no tensor calculus to understand.

John J. Reilly is a writer living in Jersey
City, N.J. He is the author of Spengler's Future.